The Charlottesville 29

Before opening Maggie’s Midtown, chef Tarik Sengul knew little about pub food. The Turkish-born chef spent much of his career cooking French cuisine before moving to Charlottesville to open Smyrna, where he applies French classical training and Aegean flavors to Virginia ingredients.

To prepare himself for Maggie’s, then, he immersed himself in learning the foods of British and Irish pubs – reading, studying, and practicing. But he has also had an ace in the hole: Casey Bauer.

Sengul met Bauer last year at Stock Provisions, where he is a frequent customer and she was working. Bauer, it turned out, once helped one of the D.C. area’s most acclaimed chefs open a pub in Northern Virginia. The talented young chef seemed like just the help Sengul needed in his exploration of pub food. But, it would take some coaxing to get her back in the kitchen.

Bauer had taken a hiatus from cooking to travel the world, and, while in France, became enamored with butchery at The Butcher of Paris. As a chef for more than a decade, she was struck by how much there is to learn about the cuts of meat that some restaurant chefs take for granted each day, and started working at the butcher. When she returned to the U.S. last year, she searched for somewhere to continue her education.

That led her to Stock Provisions, Charlottesville’s acclaimed nose-to-tail butcher, where she began working last year, and it immediately felt right. “I moved out here to Charlottesville, and it is so beautiful,” said Bauer. “It gives me even more appreciation for the farms and the people who make them so amazing for us.”

Sengul has a similar appreciation and would come in often to talk about area farms and their products. He and Bauer quickly became friends, with shared passions for cooking and butchery. When Sengul learned of Bauer’s experience in opening a pub, he asked if she’d help with the one he was planning to open in the former home to Blue Moon Diner: Maggie’s Midtown.

Bauer was once Chef de Cuisine of Mattie and Eddie’s, the former Arlington pub owned by eight-time James Beard semifinalist and Irish native, Cathal Armstrong. From Armstrong, she learned some of the very same dishes that Sengul had planned for Maggie’s, like Fish & Chips and Shepherd’s Pie. “He’s a great chef, and I am so grateful for everything I learned from him,” Bauer said. The feeling is mutual. “Casey is hard-working, has a strong passion for cuisine, and is committed to her craft,” Armstrong said.

Drawing on her experience with Armstrong, Bauer is now helping Sengul in Maggie’s kitchen. Like Sengul, Bauer constantly seeks to improve, and together they have been working on refining dishes for Maggie’s menu. The challenge for a chef, Bauer, says is elevating them while also remaining true to them. “Traditional is traditional for a reason,” said Bauer.

Among all the dishes, there’s one that has occupied more of their time than any other: the traditional Sunday Roast. On the country’s 250th Anniversary, this Saturday’s special July 4 edition of The Daily Progress explores their American take on Britain’s most iconic meal.

A common theme has recurred lately: art as a reflection of its creator.

At Smyrna, Tarik Sengul’s food reflects a Turkish upbringing, years in American kitchens with classical French training, and a new life in Charlottesville. At Sono, Sechul Yang’s food emerges from a Korean childhood and formative years cooking Italian food at Maialino. Neither set out to fuse cultures. Who they are just became what they make.

Likewise, Ramona Martinez’s genre-defying music grew out of her unique experiences and influences and formed a product no one else could create. With a mother who worked for the U.S. State Department, Martinez spent her childhood at military bases around the world – Finland, Russia, Japan, Australia – raised on Americana culture from afar, like the Turner Classic Movies on her family’s television.

If moving to the U.S. as a teenager blossomed her love of American country music, a gig as a radio host cemented it. The music Martinez played on her show spanned the 1920s to the ‘80s, but her favorite quickly became the honky tonk of the ‘50s: Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Patsy Cline. That music, along with her Mexican heritage, international travel, and love of Americana, all became part of Martinez, and therefore, her music. Whether in English, Spanish, or both, it’s always a reflection of herself. “Music, done right, is sincere,” says Martinez. “And I think everyone can connect with music that’s sincere.”

But, as Martinez explains it, the music of Ramona & The Holy Smokes is more than just her. Martinez likens it to a human body: her songwriting creates the soul and skeleton, and the band’s musicianship and experience provide the muscle – Kyle Kilduff, Brooks Hefner, Jay Ouypron, and Porter Bralley.

Among Martinez’s many influences, the first was her father – a musician and performer who sparked her love of singing as a child. So it was special for this father to enjoy Martinez’s beautiful music with my daughter on Father’s Day at Eastwood Farm Winery. Now receiving national and international acclaim, Martinez is an icon of her Charlottesville home. Catch her while you still can. July 10 at The Southern, tickets here. And follow Martinez’s band here.

Charlottesville is lucky to have her.

Fusion can be a bad word to chefs. It’s not the combining of flavors across cultures that bothers them. Many do that. What troubles them is the implication of forcing things together. Combinations that work, chefs think, evolve from experience.

At the NYC restaurant Sono, chef Sechul Yang draws on his culinary training and life experience to produce a cuisine all his own. Sono means “I am” in Italian, and Yang’s restaurant is an expression of who he is. The Korean native who came to the U.S. to attend the Culinary Institute of America spent eight years at one of New York’s most acclaimed Italian restaurants, Maialino. As he rolled noodles, simmered sauces, and braised meats, he began to notice similarities with the food that, as a child, he helped his mother cook at her restaurant in Korea.

Photo by Ben Hon.

Travel 6,000 miles west from South Korea, and you’ll find another peninsula jutting into the sea at the same latitude. The similarities with Italy don’t end there. Food as love. A culture of hospitality. Fermentation. Noodles. Locality and seasonality. Family-style meals built for sharing. And, intense regional pride — people of Jeonju, Gyeongsang, or Pyongan can feel as strongly about their food as those of Tuscany, Campania, and Emilia-Romagna.

Perhaps the deepest culinary connection is a shared appreciation for slow food. For both Koreans and Italians, a key ingredient is time, which coaxes flavors otherwise unattainable. And there’s science behind the tradition.

Take Yang’s addition of Korean slow-braised oxtail to a Roman dish known for speed: cacio e pepe. From a seat at Sono’s chef’s counter, the dish appears to come together in seconds, as Sous Chef Melissa Shaffer folds ribbons of mafaldine pasta into a quick emulsion of pecorino, pasta water, and black pepper.

But the speed is an illusion. Pecorino, after all, is aged milk. It can take months, even years, for enzymes to break down milk proteins into amino acids, yielding a deep umami flavor in cheeses like pecorino.

Adding slow-cooked oxtail boosts the effect. The meat adds umami while its collagen breaks down into gelatin, coating the palate and amplifying the perception of flavor. The result: rather than an unwelcome intruder in a classic Roman dish, the oxtail feels like it always belonged.

The menu is full of these seamless inspirations.

As side dishes, contorni are to Italy as banchan are to Korea, and Yang’s treatment of yu choy draws on both traditions. First, he does as Italians do and chars the leafy greens. Next, as he would in Korea, he makes a quick kimchi of the charred yu choy, with garlic, spice, and sugar, replacing Korean fish sauce – aekjeot – with Italian – garum.

Photo by Ben Hon.

Gratitude as Hospitality

Beyond food itself, Korea and Italy share something even more fundamental to a restaurant: a view of gratitude as a relation to others, and hospitality as its expression.

At Sono, the effect is twofold. In the open kitchen — which extends along much of the dining room — there is an uncommon sense of serenity and grace. For the calm, Yang credits gratitude, which he likens to engine oil in a car. “It helps to control the heat that can happen between the people and the work, and make things go as they are supposed to without burning them all,” Yang said. “I am thankful for my team, always doing their best in the moment.”

And in the dining room, hospitality is an extension of gratitude itself. In Korea, eunhye describes grace received and the enduring pull to return it. In Italy, ricambiare means to return kindness with kindness. In both, the belief that we are indebted to one another produces a longing to experience others’ happiness as their own.

Hospitality, then, is gratitude made visible – a host’s way of honoring the gift of a guest’s presence and seeking to share in their happiness. At Sono, servers deliver food and wine with the anticipatory glimmer of a friend who had wrapped a carefully chosen gift, eager to see it opened.

Thanks to Yang and his team, opening it is joy. Ours and theirs.